Facebook Tests New Mid-Roll Video Ads

If your Facebook News Feed truly become “all video” in five years, as has been predicted, then Facebook is going to need more ads to make money off those videos. Well, it seems like Facebook is already working on this.

Facebook is reportedly testing new mid-roll video ads. These ads will be triggered after a Facebook user has watched a video for 20 seconds. In addition, the new mid-roll ads will only appear during Facebook videos that have a running time of at least 90 seconds.

To incentivize publishers to upload longer and more compelling videos that entice people to watch longer, Facebook says it will give publishers 55 percent of ad sales. This is the same revenue split that YouTube offers.

Facebook’s new mid-roll ads, which will be labeled as “In-Stream Videos,” will be limited to 15 seconds, Marketing Land reported. Also, Facebook will let advertisers choose categories of videos where they want their ads to appear, as well as categories to avoid.

As of last January, 100 million hours of video were being watched on Facebook every day, according to the social network.

Many top marketing experts said video will be one of the hottest trends in social media in 2017 – but most publishers have been unable to make money of their videos until now. Well, unless Facebook was paying them millions to create Facebook Live videos or they were allowed to create sponsored videos (e.g., BuzzFeed Tasty).

Facebook hasn’t commented publicly on this news, which was first reported by Recode.